Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley. Cheers and St. Elsewhere. Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. The Simpsons and Family Guy. You get the idea. That’s kinda sorta what RotationandBalance is doing today with the finely written and humorous beyond reason RoundSeventeen.
Over breakfast this past weekend, Rich Siegel and I had a frank, heartfelt, bagel-fueled discussion about work we’ve done over the years. What it all means in the big picture. How it will shape our respective legacies.
I’m going to digress for a second, but stay with me. There was an episode of the first Bob Newhart Show, the one where he played psychologist Bob Hartley (kids, ask your parents). Bob starts to question his profession, thinking he’s wasted the last twenty years of his life, so he visits his teacher and mentor Dr. Albert played by Keenan Wynn (kids, ask your parents) for some reassurance.
This is what Dr. Albert tells him: “I’ve studied psychology for the last forty-five years, and come to one conclusion. It’s all a crock.”
Pretty much where we landed.
In the list of art that’s defined narrative structure, such as the works of Shakespeare, epic poems like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odessey that shaped storytelling as we know it, War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping novel of history, philosophy, and the human condition, works that have and will stand the test of time for generations to come, that little banner ad you’re already writing your acceptance speech for will be forgotten faster than you can say “No one cares.”
At breakfast, Rich and I shared what we thought was some of the worst work each of us has done. Sadly there was a lot to choose from.
But just because our print ads won’t be framed and sitting on the shelf next to the works of Shakespeare doesn’t mean there aren’t a few of them we still like.
We both went to our old, black, heavy, dusty portfolios we used to drag around to interviews (kids, ask your parents), rumaged through the expensive and heavily laminated work of yesteryear and dug some of them out.
In no particular order, these are mine. Some are clients you've heard of, some are clients that don't exist any more, and there may be one in there that never ran but I like enough to show.
Whatever the case, one thing holds true for all of them: you’ll forget about them almost as fast as you read them. But they're not awful and I'm not embarassed by them.
But because ads, not just ours but everyones, have a shorter life span than a mayfly (kids, ask your parents), do us a favor.
Live in the moment.
